Re: [READTHIS] Familiar v0.5 and the Unstable feed

Here are the practical difficulties to current upgrades right now:

1) ipkg doesn't (yet) have the ability to remove orphaned files. This means,
given that many people on 16 meg flash units run nearly full that it is quite
likely an upgrade would fail due to insufficient space.

2) since 1) is true, and we've been doing alot of work to reduce the
base familiar footprint, you'd have alot of flash filled with stuff you
no longer want/need.

3) upgrading certain essential libraries (e.g. glibc) can be quite a trick.
The way this is handled on conventional distributions (debian, rpm) is to
make sure that certain essential tools are statically linked. Due to our need
to save space, this "easy out" isn't present, so fancy footwork would really
have to work right. A number of people have been complaining they need
a more up to date glibc; Alex wants to oblige them.
We don't have the time/energy yet to try the level of fancy footwork other solutions might have, and the conventional solution doesn't work for us, given
the space constraints.

4) We intend to remove the need for a separate kernel partition by loading
the kernel out of the root's jffs file system. This will reduce alot of
hassles for alot of people, simplify the install significantly, (and allow
crazies to have more than one kernel in
flash at once), and often save flash space. So it seems to us that doing this,
which will require a new bootloader is "the right thing to do". That leaves
us needing to recover that partition space. This is possible (since we could
rewrite that partition with jffs2 empty markers), but a fair amount of hassle.

So it looked to us all that right now a fresh install is probably the
easiest way to get there from here; we don't want to gate .5 on 1)-4).
                                   - Jim

--
Jim Gettys
Technology and Corporate Development
Compaq Computer Corporation
jg_at_pa.dec.com